"You were dreaming; you are a dreamer," Mara called. "Come over here. I don't like these stupid men." The six or eight gentlemen in attendance, with the exception of Achleitner, laughed and withdrew with a humorous show of great obedience. "Why do you stay here, Achleitner?" Thus the faithful canine received his dismissal. Frederick saw how the men withdrew together in groups at a little distance, whispering as they usually do when having sport with a pretty woman who is not exactly a prude; and it was with some shame, at any rate, with expressed repugnance that he took the stool still warm from Achleitner's body. Mara began to rhapsodise about nature. "Isn't everything prettiest when the sun goes down? I think it's fun--at least I like it," she quickly substituted, when Frederick made a wry face at the remark. She spoke in sentences that all began with "I don't like," or "I despise," or "I do detest." In the face of that vast cosmic drama unfolding itself before her senses, she sat wholly unmoved and unsympathetic, displaying the overweening arrogance of a spoiled child. Frederick wanted to jump up, but remained where he was, pulling nervously at the end of his moustache, while his face assumed a stiff, mocking expression. Mara noticed it, and was visibly upset by this unusual form of homage. Frederick had one of those idealistic heads set on broad shoulders characteristic of certain circles in the "nation of poets and philosophers." His ancestors had been scholars, statesmen, and soldiers. The general, his father, was in externals wholly the soldier; but beneath his uniform, his heritage from his own father, a renowned botanist, director of the botanical gardens at Genoa, actively manifested itself in a strong interest in science. Frederick's mother was a well-read woman, passionately fond of the theatre and an enthusiastic lover of Goethe and the poets of the romantic school. Her father, who had been prime minister of Wittenberg, as a student and even later in his career, composed poetry, which her adoring love for him had caused her to publish and several times revise and reprint. Though Frederick had never been ill, there were times when he showed symptoms of a peculiar passionateness. His friends knew that when all went well, he was a dormant volcano; that when things did not go so well, he was a volcano spitting fire and smoke. To all appearances equally removed from effeminateness and brutality, he was subject, nevertheless, to accesses of both. Now and then a dithyrambic rapture came over him, especially when there was wine in his blood. He would pace about, and if it was daytime, might address a pathetic, sonorous invocation to the sun, or at night, to the constellations, particularly to the chaste Cassiopeia. Since she had known him, Mara felt that his proximity was by no means lacking in danger; but being what she was, it piqued her to play with fire.